CAIRO/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Kofi Annan, the U.N.-Arab League envoy to Syria, said on Thursday he would urge President Bashar al-Assad and his foes to stop fighting and seek a political solution, drawing angry rebukes from dissidents.

“The killing has to stop and we need to find a way of putting in the appropriate reforms and moving forward,” Annan, who is due in Damascus on Saturday, said in Cairo.

CAIRO (Reuters) – Kofi Annan, the U.N.-Arab League special envoy on Syria, said on Thursday any further militarization of the crisis there would only make the situation worse, indicating that he rejected any foreign intervention against President Bashar al-Asaad’s government.

Annan was speaking after talks with League Secretary-General Nabil Elaraby, who for his part said no one wanted a repeat of the Libya scenario in which NATO air strikes boosted the rebellion that toppled Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

CAIRO (Reuters) – Syria’s main exiled opposition must rebuild trust on the street at home by relying more on Syrians who recently lived there and it should seek foreign intervention to end bloodshed in the country, a senior group member said on Monday.

Walid al-Bunni, who fled Syria in October after years spent in and out of jail, told Reuters he and others backing a call for the group to clearly support rebels in Syria did not seek to split it up but instead wanted to bring change from within.

CAIRO, Feb 28 (Reuters) – Fake versions of the
multibillion-dollar cancer drug Avastin were purchased in Turkey
before being traded by middlemen across the Middle East and
Europe to the United States, an Egyptian businessman involved
said on Tuesday.

Milad Kamal Ayad, who works on commission for Egyptian firm
SAWA, told Reuters he sourced 167 packets of Avastin from
Turkey, via a Syrian businessman also based in Egypt, for
Swiss-based Hadicon AG.

CAIRO (Reuters) – At the end of January, a guest speaker drew an unusually large audience of diplomats to the 33rd floor auditorium at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry headquarters in Cairo. For latecomers, there was standing room only.

What made the event unique wasn’t the turnout, but the speaker: Mohamed Morsy, a leading figure in the once-banned Muslim Brotherhood, had come to outline his group’s vision of Egypt’s place in the world.

CAIRO (Reuters) – At the end of January, a guest speaker drew an unusually large audience of diplomats to the 33rd floor auditorium at the Egyptian Foreign Ministry headquarters in Cairo. For latecomers, there was standing room only.

What made the event unique wasn’t the turnout, but the speaker: Mohamed Morsy, a leading figure in the once-banned Muslim Brotherhood, had come to outline his group’s vision of Egypt’s place in the world.

CAIRO, Feb 21 (Reuters) – The trail of counterfeit
copies of the multibillion-dollar cancer drug Avastin leads to
an address in a crowded Cairo suburb, with no sign of the firm
named by international suppliers as the source of the product.

Last week’s discovery in the United States of the fake
Avastin — containing no active ingredient — sent shock-waves
through the medical community by showing how even expensive
injectable medicines, not just pills like Viagra and Lipitor,
are at risk from criminal counterfeiters.

CAIRO (Reuters) – After a bruising meeting in a five-star Cairo hotel, Arab foreign ministers led by Gulf states hinted to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that unless he halts his violent crackdown, some Arab League members might arm his opponents.

The message was folded into Article 9 of a League resolution passed on Sunday that urges Arabs to “provide all kinds of political and material support” to the opposition, a phrase that includes the possibility of giving weapons to Assad’s foes.

CAIRO (Reuters) – Arab foreign ministers will discuss a proposal next week to send a joint U.N.-Arab mission to Syria, a senior Arab League official said on Thursday, after a solely Arab team failed to end President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on protests.

Ministers meet in Cairo on Sunday to consider whether to extend or scrap an observer mission sent to Syria in December but which was criticized by Syria’s opposition, faced internal dissent and retreated to hotels for safety as violence surged.

CAIRO (Reuters) – The Arab League chief said on Monday that Russia and China had lost diplomatic credit in the Arab world by vetoing a U.N. resolution on Syria and may have sent a message to Damascus that it had a free hand to crack down on protests.

But Nabil Elaraby said he would continue working with Moscow and Beijing and other U.N. Security Council members to end the violence that spiked on Monday with the bombardment of the Syrian city of Homs, which activists said killed 50 people.